A book of ephemera by Nicholson Baker is the equivalent of a magnum opus by most other American writers, and vulnerable to equivalent failings – not over-reach but under-reach. Baker (pictured) takes small subjects but he leaves them small, failing to summon in his work as a journalist (broadly defined) the transformative energies on display in his novels (The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, A Box of Matches, The Anthologist) and in his exhaustively confessional memoir about his love-affair-from-afar with John Updike, U & I: A True Story. Too often, when confronted or presented with a grain of sand in which to see the world, Baker just sets about describing it, molecule by molecule.

In his brief foreword, he explains that when he was starting out, he felt that he was "helping to bring back the personal essay", but 30 years on, it is a form with which he continues to struggle. Asked by the Nouvel Observateur to write an essay in April 1994, he interprets the brief narrowly: "I took my daughter to school," and so on. You can only imagine the fallen expression on the face of Dan Crow, the editor of the anthology How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, when, having nurtured such high hopes, he received the email bearing Baker's 38 words on wearing earplugs ("I buy them from the drugstore … I can sit any where, in any loud place, and work").

Even "La Mer", the liveliest essay in the opening section ("Life"), is compromised by a fundamental error of judgment. It concerns a trip to the Eastbourne Grand Hotel, where Debussy adjusted the orchestration, and corrected the proofs, of La Mer. The putatively central moment comes in the final sentence when Baker looks out of a window and "thought I saw, for a moment, what Debussy had seen". But the epiphany, so conventionally placed and phrased, can only fall flat after Baker's memorable claim that Debussy's use of "the whole-tone scale" has been worn out by "cop-show soundtracks", or the description, right there in the opening paragraph, of his first proper encounter with Debussy's music: "I put on the heavy, padded headphones, that were like inflatable life rafts for each ear, and I heard Debussy's side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests, and I saw the sudden immensity of the marine horizon that followed the storm, and I was amazed by how true to liquid life it all was."

Baker has followed Updike's habit in collecting all of his journalism, every ribbon-cutting speech and potboiling review, but when Updike wrote about, say, his favourite hour of the day (11am) or his favourite spot in New York City (West 155th Street), he turned each lame-duck commission into a thing of beauty (you only have to compare Baker's "Coins", about working at a shopping mall, fishing the coins out of the fountain, with "Early Inklings", Updike's contribution to the same New Yorker series of reflections on First Jobs). And he was offering the results alongside meatier reflections on, say, Mark Twain and the 1950s and the portrayal of New York City in literature. Baker only emulates Updike the boy – enchanted by the everyday, harbouring a fetishist's fear of e-books, praising the "cheery", rejecting the "frosty" – not Updike the man of letters.

A memorial address about Updike entitled "The Nod" has its moments, or rather its moment. Baker recalls spotting his hero in the Boston Public Garden, and decides instead of bothering him, he would simply nod ("I would pack in everything I knew about him in my nod, all my memories I had of reading about packed dirt and thimbles and psoriasis …"). Otherwise, it's a desultory piece of work, the feelings Baker experiences no more rawly expressed than the feelings he predicted experiencing when he imagined Updike's death 20 years earlier in U & I ("immortality" becomes "ongoingness").

In the final essay, "Mowing" – essentially a rewriting of the contented-sigh passages that close Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness, with Sunday morning exchanged for Saturday, and orange juice for coffee – Baker writes that curiosity "is a way" (is a way?) "of ordering and indeed paring down the world"; but the kind of "curiosity" he displays is all too easily sated. Having asked "why" Wikipedia is so popular, he writes: "Because it has 2.2 million users, and because it's very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there." To invoke by way of an answer the high number of users is to draw a perfect circle. Surely its placement on Google was, at least initially, a product of popularity? And that "just" is the rhetorical equivalent of shrugged shoulders and raised palms.

Some of the essays aim for charm or warmth, others for penetration, none for both. The jacket copy says that Baker "surveys our fascination with video games", but that's exactly what he doesn't do in "Painkiller Deathstreak", essentially a review of a handful of video games he failed to master. The essay, which rambles on for 7,000 words, is in some ways the most typical, turning something that Baker doesn't like – violence, warfare – into something he does – play, imagination, "explorable specificity" – without acknowledging any connection between the two. He allows himself to be analytical only about things that disagree with him. Otherwise, he is mostly content to skim the surface – and to offer the reader whipped cream.

The exceptions are few but thrilling. Writing about commonplace books ("Narrow Ruled"), Baker gets right to it from the opening sentence ("When I come across something I really like in a book, I put a dot in the margin") and never flags, delivering a gathering of quotations about the gathering of quotations. In "Grab Me a Gondola", a long, laidback (as it were) piece of reporting, he makes a case for gondoliers over water taxis that is romantic where his case for print books over e-books is both sentimental and pragmatic. An essay about the treatment of interior thought in fiction ("I Said to Myself") succeeds in treating the subject with a mixture of levity and hand-wringing seriousness. It also provides a keyhole history of modern literature in which Tom Clancy and Stephen King are presented as "post-Faulknerians", on account of their taste for italics.